Saturday, November 1, 2008

The Importance of Data Backups

All PCs and their parts are subject to failure. Essentially imminently each business will be faced with some kind of PC failure. The biggest threat to companies in a failure will be some form of info loss or info corruption. While the reasons for information loss and info corruption change, not all are simply fixed.

When an information loss or info corruption happens, plenty of times the sole option is to revive the info from a formerly made backup of the influenced info. Plenty of companies today over look the significance of information backups till they suffer the sudden loss or corruption of valuable information. Once this happens it'd be too late, unless the business is fortunate enough to revive the information by physically recreating all the influenced files from the start. This naturally is only probable if they've a hard copy or another source from which to recreate the information. It'll also cost the business a valuable amount of man hours in recreating the information too. That is if they are lucky enough to be in a position to even recreate the information in the 1st place. If your business has made backups of all info stored on the hard drives, restoring that data will go much quicker and require a load less effort. It'll also need a ton less man hours and tears shed over the loss which has took place. Today there are tons of options available to companies for storing and backing up their information. Some of the options available are tape drives and tape libraries, CD-R's and CD-RW's to DVD technologies. There's also the option to use NAS ( Network Area Storage ) and SAN ( Storage Area Networks ) and even remote backups over the Net. Even Windows XP / Server 2003 offers a revive point in case your system becomes corrupted. Naturally just having these tools available to you isn't enough.

They have to be used correctly and on a successive basis to be effective. Imminently all systems will face some form of failure that may need a revive from backup. The point is to perform those backups so they are there when you want them. It is advised that you sit down with your systems director to make a backup plan for your business right away if you've not done so already. Also suggested, is that you review your backup plan annual too. When discussing your backup plan there are certain options to think about. Like how frequently to perform the backups and what sort of backup media is most fitted for your business. Depending on your sort of business and how much your data changes from day by day you may wish to perform backups weekly, daily, or many times each day. For most little to mid-sized companies I might suggest a full backup once per week with incremental backups at the end of each work day. You can also desire to think about if to keep some of your backups off site in the case your business is influenced by some kind of natural or man made disaster. In addition you could also require software to monitor your backup process to make sure that your backups are no longer corrupted too. This could be a common experience with some kinds of backup media too. Ultimately you can also wish to perform a system revive on an occasional basis so you can check the usefulness of the restoration process that you have set in place and to practice it so it is going as smoothly as feasible. Following these steps might be crucial to your business continuity should your systems fail and you suffer a loss or corruption of info. Setting up a backup plan as well as a restoration plan will also go a good way in making sure your business operations if you run into a system failure. This would help build a "who is to do what" list if your systems should fail. Failing to backup your business information, particularly mission urgent info is nothing short of a recipe for disaster. Nothing is as crucial to your business as the information that sits on the hard drives of your systems.

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